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Thanks to my dear friend Carel Haumann for introducing me to this
short essay.
The
Absurd Man, by Albert Camus
"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is
indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who,
without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia
is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning.
The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with
what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his
temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and
of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the
span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which
he shields from any judgment but his own. A greater life for him
cannot mean another life. That would be unfair. I am not even speaking
here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity. Mme Roland
relied on herself. That rashness was taught a lesson. Posterity
is glad to quote her remark, but forgets to judge it. Mme Roland
is indifferent to posterity.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen
people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that
integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that
the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God:
the one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside
that God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd
man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to
justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence.
That innocence is to be feared. "Everything is permitted,"
exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on
condition that it not be taken in a vulgar sense. I don't know whether
or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it is not an outburst
of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact.
The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in
attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice
would not be hard to make. But there is no choice, and that is where
the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted"
does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of
those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish,
but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences
are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One
can be virtuous through a whim.
All systems of mortality are based on the idea that an action has
consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the
absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered
calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible
persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most,
such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its
future actions.
Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field
that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything
to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What
rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only
truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes
to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect
ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations
and the breath of human lives. The
few following images are of this type. They prolong the absurd reasoning
by giving it a specific attitude and their warmth.
Do I need to develop the idea that an example is not necessarily
an example to be followed (even less so, if possible, in the absurd
world) and that these illustrations are not therefore models? Besides
the fact that a certain vocation is required for this, one becomes
ridiculous, with all due allowance, when drawing from Rousseau the
conclusion that one must walk on all fours and from Nietzsche that
one must maltreat one's mother. "It is essential to be absurd,"
writes a modern author, "it is not essential to be a dupe."
The attitudes of which I shall treat can assume their whole meaning
only through consideration of their contraries.
A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness
is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard.
There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man.
They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no
importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances,
but of himself.
I am choosing solely men who aim only to expend themselves or whom
I see to be expending themselves. That has no further implications.
For the moment I want to speak only of a world in which thoughts,
like lives, are devoid of future. Everything that makes man work
and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious
is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of
a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.
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